Watch Festo's SmartBird Robot Soar Over TED Conference

Festo's SmartBird robotic seagull is barely four months old, but already it's flown (or we should probably assume, been flown) from Germany to Edinburgh for the 2011 TEDGlobal conference. Festo's Markus Fischer, the SmartBird project leader, presented a short talk about SmartBird, along with a couple live demonstrations of the robot, complete with a few friendly dive-bombings:

If you're looking for another TEDTalk to wile away your Monday with, allow me to recommend Kevin Slavin's fascinating presentation on how algorithms are shaping our world, which uses some vacuuming robot pics that you might recognize to illustrate how abstract programming can have tangible effects on our daily lives.